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Linux Multi-Monitor Support Could Be Improved

09-08-2012, 11:10 AM

Phoronix: Linux Multi-Monitor Support Could Be Improved

While some want Linux multi-monitor support removed, others are looking for it to be improved. Multiple display support for Linux has improved over the years with X.Org and desktop environment advancements, it's still generally less than ideal, especially for Linux gamers...

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I can defiantly attest to this. I have two monitors, one is a smaller resolution (and different aspect ratio) than the other. Many games have a very hard time going full-screen. It's like the coders simply never tested their games on a multi-monitor setup...

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multi-monitor, bha haha. windows nt had a perfectly working KMS since 1993. Ten years later and nomodeset is one of the most popular options in grub. maybe in a century they'll have proper mixing in pulseaudio and hybrid gpu support.

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multi-monitor, bha haha. windows nt had a perfectly working KMS since 1993. Ten years later and nomodeset is one of the most popular options in grub. maybe in a century they'll have proper mixing in pulseaudio and hybrid gpu support.

KMS? Any open source driver should have perfect KMS for any supported hardware (RadeonSI may even have KMS working right if you pull from git)

Pulseaudio mixing? Works fine on my end with any Intel sound card, and AMD HDMI audio (with both Catalyst and with Fedora 17's ATI driver.) I cant attest to any others since I dont do discrete sound cards, just built in

Hybrid GPU support? Xorg 1.13 (released the other day) and any open source driver OR soon the Nvidia proprietary driver. AMD Catalyst I heard has a built-in intel driver to be able to control the integrated GPU but i'm not positive on that.

Does Windows currently have a headstart on some "Desktop" features? Yeah, they do. They've cared about the desktop a lot longer than the Linux community has. But I'm noticing that what took Windows from 1995 up through 7 (Vista didnt support hybrid graphcs, i think) the Linux community has managed to do since 2009.

Why do I say 2009? Because Ubuntu 9.10 was the first Linux distro I used for more than a month and sound frequently broke, i had to use nomodeset just like you said, and hybrid graphics didnt exist yet. Now we're at 12.10 and hybrid has a solution in place, just working on support. and 13.04 should have a pretty nice graphics stack to play around with.

^
I use Ubuntu because theyre releases are time-stamped. Just made things easier for the example. Frankly, Fedora will be in an even better position. And Arch and gentoo can more easily pull from git so they are in an even BETTER situation. So April of next year is kind of the backend of when things should work.

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I can defiantly attest to this. I have two monitors, one is a smaller resolution (and different aspect ratio) than the other. Many games have a very hard time going full-screen. It's like the coders simply never tested their games on a multi-monitor setup...

Same here, which is why I now use Zaphod Mode. I am too much of a gamer to have to keep dealing with this crap, and in the end Zaphod syncs better with my workflow anyway as I like to keep my two screens almost completely separate. Still some annoyances, as of course you can no longer drag windows, but I have a nice panel launcher set to auto-hide on the second screen for getting around that and easily allowing me to launch my necessarily applications. Xfce even allows me to set a different wallpaper for each screen, although I would much rather it gave me an option to turn off the icons on the second screen. There is also a problem with some programs refusing to open up a new session if there is already one open on another screen, but that is a rare issue.

Going back to complaining about xfdesktop, it also has a nasty habit of rearranging your desktop icons upon a screen resolution change. I now keep a permanent backup of it's icon position configuration files in ~/.config/xfce4/desktop for the many times I have had to restore them back to their original state, and often just turn the desktop off for long periods in frustration (which, coincidentally, does finally allow me to have my second screen free of icons). In the end, the best way I think for a game to handle this is to give the users the option to set what they want themselves in the games launcher, like how Shadowgrounds, Trine, and Amnesia handle it. No game should ever assume anything by itself.

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Xinerama doesn't have compositing. Fine, Nvidia's twinview only supports 2 screens but has compositing. So I setup two cards and separate x servers. But kde doesn't work well with multi-head and needs rewritting.

Wasn't there a time when linux was used for bleeding edge hardware and setups, or was it always just to revive old computers?

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I personally haven't found much of a need for multi-monitor support, at least not under 1 desktop session. I enjoy multi-dispaly setups in which I only have 1 display that I actively use, with the rest as idle and used for miscelaneous information. Other than that, in linux I just feel there isn't much of a need for multiple monitors for a typical user. In Windows, you don't get multiple desktops so multiple monitors can become a necessity. But in the end, I personally feel there just isn't a point of having more than 1 unless you NEED to keep track of several different things at the same time.

I feel like if you're running several services/procedures at the same time, a multi-monitor setup is necessary. I think if you need to monitor live data (such as the stock market), it is necessary. I think if you're running simulated environments, its necessary. They're necessary for photo/video editing, but for most artists it isn't needed at all. They're also great for multi-user setups. Just about everything else, I personally feel multiple monitors are a waste.